About

This program auto-plays the game "Iota", copywrite by GameWrite, in a SPA using some really simple DFS single-ply lookahead.

GUI options:

1. Play One Turn - Causes the engine to play the next player's turn.
2. Reset - Reset the board, reshuffle, and deal
3. Autoplay Once - Causes the engine to finish the game
4. Autoplay Forever - Play until clicking "Stop"
5. Set seed - If not using Math.random(), a PRNG sets a seed which can then be used to restart the same game. Great for debug, but the PRNG will bias toward one player after a thousand games or so by as much as 10%.
6. Export/Import - The game state can be exported as a hex string, or re-imported via cut-and-paste into this area.

Each time a game finishes, the scores, board side, and # of turns are reported on the left-hand side. Note that it does not render while autoplaying as it becomes progressively slower for reasons I don't quite get (because how many times do you create & destory millions of VueJS components?).

Running

You can play it live here!

Browser

It's a NuxtJS app, so:

% yarn
% yarn dev

And then open a browser at localhost:3000. See screenshot below.

NodeJS app

It can also be run as a NodeJS app, which is 3x faster since VueJS hasn't applied reactivity to all of the objects (reactiveGetter eats up a lot of cycles).

% yarn ts-node -T main.ts
% yarn ts-node -T tests/regression01.ts
% yarn ts-node -T tests/regression02.ts

The file main.ts is just for experimenting. The two regressions have their own output files which I use to verify correctness (regression01 has a checksum), and predictability (regression02 evaluates how well the winner can be predicted at each ply).

Compatability & Performance

On my 2019 MacBook Pro (Intel Core i9) I get the following performance:

• Firefox: ~70 msec per game
• Chrome: ~40 msec per game
• Safari: ~1000 msec per game
• NodeJS: ~25 msec per game (0.960 msec per ply)

Problems

1. The games starts to really slow down after ~700 turns. The heatmap in FireFox shows it is the DOM being re-rendered. I'm experimenting with different layouts to see what is causing the problem. If I comment out the board table in the template, there is no slowdown, so something in there is causing a problem.

Screenshot